Hajja Salesjana November December 2016

26 The last photo of Sister Cecilia Maria, the Argentinian Carmelite sister who died of cancer at age 43, some months ago has drawn the attention and affections of the Catholic world. Accounts tell us that Sister often played the violin for her fellow Carmelites as a sweet gift of music, but it was in her final moment that Sister Cecilia Maria provided her smile as one last antiphon of sweetness to the world. And it’s worth pondering her smile, and her life, because she had some very important lessons to teach the world. First, she reminds us what beauty really is. For a society that is so focused on beauty, very little attention is spent on defining beauty. What is beauty, and what relation does it have to love? What relation do love and beauty have to happiness? These questions are not original to this author; indeed, these are the primal questions of the great literature, the great thoughts, and the great philosophy. But we’ve stopped asking them, not because we have answered them properly, but because we stopped caring about the questions. Yet, regardless of philosophy, society nevertheless proffers its explanation of beauty. Sadly, these explanations are often tepid, if not altogether stupid. Case in point. The covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan serve as a microcosm of a generation that has lost it; indeed, who is lost. The cover girls are gaunt, distant, and unhappy looking—all by editorial design. Their God-given inner beauty has been robbed; they often embody a plasticity of soullessness, and that denial of soul is a bigger lie than any airbrush could ever accomplish. These ubiquitous covers offer our wives and daughters a poorly- scripted fictional world that is governed by mannequins. Then, in a stroke of spiritual serendipity, we see the picture of Sister Cecilia Maria; in a striking and immediate contrast to the faux world of models, we see the type of beauty that is borne of love and happiness. Among the vast array of cover girls who look dour in life, here is a woman who looks majestically happy in death. Truly, hers is the countenance of Christianity. Christianity may not be in vogue, yet if one seeks the issue of happiness and fulfillment, the love of God is where to look. Whereas our society is like a man who holds Let us know how to live in such a way as to show that we are, as educators and evangelizers, on fire for the good of the young and collaborators in God’s Plans.